Jordan Huie of the Overtimer here and we are closing in on a pretty damn crazy weekend of wrestling. The long talked about NXT main roster invasion has finally happened over the past few weeks, and we’ve been led to a surreal couple of shows. First we have NXT TakeOver: WarGames 2019. It’s a big show, in spite of only having four matches due to the length expected from the double WarGames encounters. I’ll be doing a match by match preview for the whole card, so let’s get to it!
WarGames Match: The Undisputed Era (Adam Cole, Roderick Strong, Bobby Fish & Kyle O’Reilly) vs. Tommaso Ciampa, Keith Lee, Donovan Dijakovic & TBD
The Undisputed Era here in WarGames for the third consecutive year. It’s their specialty match in a sense. They’re effectively the Four Horsemen of this age, given that the famous stable participated in all but one of the first fifteen WarGames matches against all sorts of different babyface team combinations.
This time around, they face perhaps their biggest band of challengers yet in the form of Tommaso Ciampa, Keith Lee, Donovan Dijakovic and a fourth member yet to be named at this time of writing.
Indeed, even after NXT this past Wednesday, it seems they’ve opted to leave a spot open. The fourth member of Team Ciampa is a mystery as of now, and may well continue to be when the show starts.
The Johnny Gargano situation seems directly tied to this fact.
It’s fairly clear that originally, Gargano was meant to square off with Finn Balor earlier in the night. Matt Riddle was also pretty clearly intended to be on the WarGames team. But after it appeared that Gargano would not be cleared to wrestle at the event, things got switched around. Matt Riddle instead is now booked against Finn, and a spot is open in the match.
Still, the fact that they went through that go-home show this past Wednesday without revealing this is a little puzzling. To me, it hints that they’re still actually hoping to get Johnny onto the show after all. In a recent conference call, Triple H claimed that Gargano was ‘day to day’, a term used in sports to refer to an injured player who is on the fringe of being ready to go and essentially could be cleared at any time.
I figure the reason they’re leaving this spot open is so, in the event of Johnny being cleared to wrestle, they can perhaps sub him into the match at the last minute. He’d be a logical partner. Velveteen Dream would also be a logical candidate, but in his case it seems confirmed that he won’t be cleared in time.
Whoever it is, this should be an epic battle to say the least. These WarGames matches from NXT have been utterly insane and this will be no different.
As far as who wins though, I’m picking Team Ciampa.
With three champions on one side, it just seems like the best course of action to have the other side win so as to simultaneously setup a ton of big time title matches. Ciampa would go after Cole, Lee and Dijakovic can put their differences aside to challenge Fish & O’Reilly, and whomever else enters the match can go after Roderick Strong’s North American title.
NXT TakeOver: WarGames 2019 will be airing this Saturday on the WWE Network at 7 PM Eastern Time, 6 Central. There will also be a half hour pre-show leading into the event. The show emanates from the Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Illinois. I’m Jordan Huie of the Overtimer, and I will be giving a live play by play of the show as it happens.
